I think that politics very often brings out the worst in people, as it basically breaks everyone down into a self/not-self category. And it also warps our perceptions of other people. part of the problem with the fundamentalists is that many of them, simply put, have no actual experience with homosexual people. They simply can't relate to the concept because they don't have a human face to put it to... It's like an abstract concept. I think, the more different type of people you experience, the more open-minded you'll be. Now, Cheaney is pretty right-wing, right? Yet he disagrees with the constitutional ban on gay marriage. This is largely due to the fact his daughter is a lesbian. Because he can relate to the issue on a personal level, he can't as easily slip into the narrow-minded headset so common among the fundamentalist set.
Of course, this works both ways. In the past I've very often dissed cops and soldiers. But recently I got into a car accident (no one was killed or seriously hurt, fortunetly) and the cop on scene was the nicest guy ever. So I had to change some of my viewpoints on that a bit. Also, besides barbelith I'm a member of a gaming forum and that place exposes me to a lot of people of all different shapes and sizes. One good friend of mine there is a soldier and a conservative, though he's more of a fiscal conservative then social. Once he told us that he and some of his army friends had sat around once and discussed what they'd ever do if the US government told them to do something that was a clear violation of civil rights. Most of them agreed that they'd probably refuse orders or rebel. He also told me that most generals are opposed to the idea of a draft... Why would they want soldiers who don't even want to be there anyway? My conversations with this individual showed me that perhaps not all soldiers are brainless macho guys who can't think for themselves.
Interestingly enough I mentioned this thread to a friend of mine who knows a lot about politics and he said "No offense, but I think your friends are over-reacting big time". He told me that these things often go in cycles... For example, the 80's were a very conservative time, but then the 90's were liberal, and now it looks like we're back in a conservative cycle. However, what's really weird was that in the neocon 80's gay people finally came to be accepted, to some extent... mainly because they were dying of AIDS, but you take what victories you can get. And now, in these very conservative Bush administration times, gays finally begin to get married... Something that didn't happen during the eight fairly liberal years of the Clinton administration. This makes me think that change is an irrepresible force and that, try as hard as they can to contain it, it'll still happen anyway. Right now gay marriage is just a convienent scapegoat, kinda like Oscar Wilde during the decline of the British Empire. Grant Morrison says the American empire is going down, and this may very well be it's final thrashings. We just have to make sure that we survive the death throes.
I'm not taking an apocalyptic viewpoint of these matters at all, as that's just "their" thinking patterns. I mean, I'm sure many artists and punks in the 80's thought that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, what with the combo of Reagan and Thatcher. Yet civilization moved on, and I feel such will be the case here again.
Anyway, I guess you could say I agree with Jack Frost's idea of "killing" the "enemy" with kindness. Awhile back in the comics forum I posted this story but I'll tell it again to illustrate my point. When I was in college I was one of the lead officers of the campus gay-straight alliance. The only problem was it was mostly gay people, as the only straights we managed to attract were girls (come to think of it, I was one of the only guys in that group, for that matter). Now, one of our goals was spreading awareness about gay issues, gay rights, tolerance, fighting homophobia, and all that. We did this in a variety of ways.
For example, once we had a talk on homophobia. Not many students attended, but there was this one guy who did: He looked like your typical gang member, the bling, all that, and as I recall he was Puerto Rican. Just looking at him the instinctual thought-processes of my conditioning kicked in: "Oh, look at this macho tough guy. He's probably just here to cause triuble or make fun of us". But to my surprise he told us that he had a friend who was very homophobic and some of his ideas on gay people were also slightly negative, so he wanted to learn more about homophobia and gay people in general. The fact he was trying to learn more about a group of people that his upbringing obviously had a bias against touched me. He came to a few of our other functions, actually. We actually connected with a lot of people, I think, and usually we did this best when we offered food, friendliness, and things of that nature. Food in particular is a great communicator, especially if it's sweets.
Of course, we did cause controversy at times too, like there was this one time we did this live homo acts thing where we said live homo acts were going on in the campus cafeteria. Of course, people got there and just saw us sitting around, eating, chatting, reading, and other banal mundane activities. But some people who saw the sign just walked away yelling they didn't want to see any sex stuff or making out. Still, some people did tell us they thought it was clever, even some middle-aged black woman who worked at the campus ministry. And the priest at the campus would often speak about tolerance and equality and things like that.
So, I guess you could say that the problem with these backwater fundamentalist types is that they cut themselves away from the world and thus cannot see people of other lifestyles as just that, people. The same could maybe be said for intellectual anarchist art students who just stay in their dorms or apartments all day or whatever while claiming all cops are pigs, all politicians are evil, and so on. The problem is that the solution is never so plainly laid out or cut and dry, and our own prejudices (and I've been guilty of this myself) prevent us from connecting with other people. Sometimes it seems we have more in common with our "foes" then we think.
What's that old song? "There ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy, there's only you and me, and we just disagree".
Okay, enough hallmark card hippy-dippy shit. I've ranted. |
